What began in 1881 as a small community of seventeen settlers, led by Chicago emigrants Anna and Horatio Spafford, quickly burgeoned into a utopian Christian project. By 1896, the American Colony of Jerusalem had approximately 150 residents, due to successive waves of millennialist immigration from Sweden and other nations, fueled by “Jerusalem Fever”. In need of more space, the Colony leased the palatial East Jerusalem home of Rabbah Daoud Amin Effendi al-Husseini, an Ottoman pasha, and set up a school that the Library of Congress describes as catering to “the children of well-to-do Muslim families, visiting diplomats, and a religious and ethnic mix of Jewish, Armenian, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Ethiopian and European youth”. The following decades saw farming cooperatives, artisan weavers, a tennis court, soup kitchens, watchmakers, a museum of natural history, a Dodge dealership, bakeries, a literary club, and photography studios — all under the sign of the American Colony. This cottage industriousness was coupled with heady theological experimentation. The American Colony Photographers were trained and led by Elijah Meyers, the Bombay-born, Oxford-educated son of a rabbi, who wore a green silk turban, was said to build his own cameras and batteries, got his start photographing the First Aliyah for Views of Palestine and its Jewish Colonies (1899), and fashioned himself as the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah.
Photography became a key component of the American Colony’s economic success. Major contributions have been credited in retrospect to: the Swedish trio Lewis Larsson, Erik Lind, and Olaf Lind — the latter of whom settled in Deir Yassin after his expulsion from the Colony, and supposedly sued the young Israeli state after the 1948 massacre — Palestinian Arab Hanna Safieh, who went on to become Public Information Officer in Mandatory Palestine (and the majority of whose pre-1948 photographs were stolen in the aftermath of the Six-Day War and never recovered), American brothers Furman and Norman Baldwin, Fareed Naseef, whose Lebanese mother was a member of the early settlement, and Eric Matson, who inherited the photographic archive after the dissolution of the American Colony. Along with their peers, they created hand-colored photographs, print series, thematic albums, stereographs, postcards, panoramas, lantern slides, and other images. Produced commercially to be sold to tourists as a form of “artifactual memory”, and for illustrating periodicals like National Geographic and Reader’s Digest, the images captured religious ceremonies, political affairs, the everyday activities of a diverse population, and, of course, the biodiversity of plant life in the region.
Gundelia (G. Tournefortii L.)